Greenberg: Lessons on Ferguson, Cincinnati

What a surfeit of surreal scenes have been pouring out of little Ferguson, Missouri, these past few weeks — as if they’d never end. Amazing. Some of us couldn’t stop watching the unending spectacle, painful as it was. Goethe said it: “There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.” Or more mesmerizing. Was this thing ever going to end? It didn’t look like it for a while there, as if there were an endless supply of bad decisions in and around that once ordinary suburb. Goodness, what a little town and what big, even national and international news it was making. And none of it welcome.

Little old Ferguson (Pop, 21,203) was a big story and rightly so, since all concerned — whether in law enforcement or out, whether inside agitators or outside — kept providing the rest of us with one example after another of atrocious judgment and worse behavior.

But some cities actually learned from them.

Cincinnati, for example. It’s not easy now to recall the days when Cincinnati was making the kind of jarring headlines that Ferguson has just done. Yes, Cincinnati — long one of the most civilized of American cities, an outpost of German order and Kultur in the American Midwest.

And yet, not all that long ago, Cincinnati was facing the worst kind of trouble a city can have. For on a Saturday night back in 2001, an unarmed black teenager, 19-year-old Timothy Thomas, was shot and killed by a white policeman, Stephen Roach, and within days all hell would break loose. It would take years — and a lot of wisdom, patience and humility — to put Cincinnati back together again, let alone create a new and even better Cincinnati. How did they do that?

The rest of us are indebted to Peter Bronson, former editorial page editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, for summarizing how his town made its way back from chaos, and in so doing gave the rest of us a point-by-point guide for future reference:

• Tell the public everything immediately. In Cincinnati, the cops had nothing to say about the shooting for days afterward. And official silence is an invitation to doubt and distrust.

• Set the record straight. Don’t let an out-of-control media spread falsehoods and general hysteria, which is what happened in Cincinnati back in the early 2000s.

• Don’t crucify the cops. Those in Cincinnati exercised heroic restraint and risked their lives every night all night to restore calm after riots struck that city. In the midst of all that, they were being badmouthed left, right and center.

• Don’t let the feds make a bad problem worse.

• Repudiate race-baiters.

In the end, it took years to put Cincinnati back together again. Step by step. That city reformed its police department. Completely. It held public meetings at which good will was shown by all concerned. It elected a new mayor, a black man who in turn appointed the first black police chief in Cincinnati’s history. By 2008, almost a decade after the riots there, Cincinnati was playing host to the NAACP’s national convention. Now it’s once again the Cincinnati we’ve long admired and enjoyed. Who says we all can’t do better? And that includes your town and mine, too.